Hello lovely writers! Welcome back to my It’s a Writer Thing mini-series on stimulus control and generalizability. As you may recall, I’m a clinical psychologist, which means I get to take advantage of all those great psychological theories and put them to work for me in my writing, and I want to share that with you.

In my last two posts, I talked about the benefit of ingraining a very powerful urge to write by creating a habit. Writing under the same circumstances every day for a few weeks can create stimulus control in which the environment triggers our writing behavior. But I also cautioned that we can sometimes hinder ourselves if we limit our writing to only that special circumstance. We don’t want to limit ourselves! We want to be productive no matter where we are, right? So, to avoid that, once we’ve established a good habit, we need to vary our writing environment (while still sticking with our routine) so we can train ourselves to write under a variety of stimuli. This will allow for optimal productivity.

Today, I want to add in two new concepts: cognitive control and locus of control.

Definitions

Cognitive control: refers to the way people’s behavior can be driven by mental constructs such as plans, instructions, goals, and prior events. It also refers to the way our behavior can vary in real time, allowing it to change as our plans, goals, and values (etc.) vary. This allows our behavior as a whole to be flexible instead of rigid.Locus of Control: In other words, to whom or what we attribute our success (or failure). Is it because of things inside of us (i.e., internal locus of control) or things outside of us (i.e., external locus of control)?

​​How does this all fit in with stimulus control and generalizability?

STEP 1: First off, we must recognize that external stimuli impact our behavior. That’s exactly why stimulus control and generalizability work, right? Whether we’re talking writing behavior, eating behavior, study habits, whether we get on Facebook or get to work on that MS instead, we can’t ignore the impact of external factors on what we do. If we try to, we’re losing out on some potentially helpful stuff and maybe even setting ourselves up for failure (like if we minimize the impact of a coworker bringing donuts to work when we’re trying to count calories).

So, step 1, just remember that external factors impact us.

STEP 2: External factors don’t have to be the end-all be-all of our behavior. Yes, stimulus control is powerful, but so is your brain. We need to remember that the executive control of our behavior lies within us.